Today I am going to do something I rarely ever do on my blog and that is share someone else's writing. This is an article written by Christopher Volpe - Why Art is Good for Your Soul. I think it is a nice segue from the prevous conversations we have been having on this topic.
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“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” – Rachel Carson
Art can be a marvelous way of waking up. Our modern lives tend toward repetition, distraction, dullness, and dazed alienation – everything but feeling truly alive and awake to what’s potentially amazing and awe-inspiring all around us.
To “dwell among the beauties and mysteries,” as pioneering environmental writer Rachel Carson says, is to acquire a taste for life behind its daily frustrations and disappointments.
Even if only in stolen moments, our souls need us to pay attention to what’s intriguing, abiding, and nurturing in beauty and in nature. What calls us to the splendors and enigmas of art and nature is something beyond, something more than the workaday demands and pressures that dull our wits and wear us down.
Making art invites us to escape what Buddhism calls “monkey mind,” the constant babble of unproductive brain chatter happening inside our harried, busy brains. As common as it is maddening, brain chatter is not exempt from pressing pause. And paradoxically, the better you get at catching yourself paying attention to brain chatter (that is, the more you notice it), the easier it becomes to make it go away.
Getting lost in art, both in looking and in making, is good medicine. Drawing and painting are wonderfully meditative as they allow your scattered thoughts to rest as your hands play. Sometimes, you just need the brain chatter to STOP so you can get to the calm and quiet needed to enjoy your life. Making art, getting lost in it and appreciating it with deep looking, can help with that.
In many ways, art calls us to more fulfilling experiences. We discover, in a Madonna by Raphael or a landscape by Thomas Cole, deeper realms than we meet in daily life – deeper realms which we know exist but that we tend to ignore and forget. Great artists, through their best work, share new and yet somehow deeply familiar ways of experiencing the world with great intensity.
Losing the monkey mind, waking up to wonder and awe, “dwelling among the beauties and mysteries of the earth” are crucial in creating meaning, feeing the spirit, and finding inner peace.
By Christopher Volpe
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I have copied the entire article plus photos as is - as he makes his articles free to share . If you would like to see more of his articles follow the link below:
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